Caroline Neuber

Caroline Neuber, née Friederike Caroline Weissenborn, (born March 9, 1697, Reichenbach, Saxony [Germany]—died November 30, 1760, Laubegast, near Dresden), actress-manager who was influential in the development of modern German theatre.

Rebelling against her tyrannical father, she ran away at age 20 with a young clerk, Johann Neuber, and married him in 1718. They served their theatrical apprenticeship in the traveling companies of Christian Spiegelberg (1717–22) and Karl Caspar Haack (1722–25). In 1727 they formed their own company and were granted a patent by the elector of Saxony, Frederick Augustus I, to perform at the Leipzig Easter Fair. As early as 1725 Caroline Neuber’s acting had attracted the attention of Johann Christoph Gottsched, the critic and drama reformer who modeled his work on classical French tragedy and comedy. “Die Neuberin,” as he came to call her, substituted in her company a careful learning of parts and rehearsal for the heavily improvised farces and harlequinades that then dominated the German stage. The collaboration of Gottsched and Neuber, which lasted until 1739, is usually regarded as the turning point in the history of German theatre and the start of modern German acting.

After three years of engagements in other German cities, the Neuber company returned to Leipzig in 1737 to discover that their patent, after the death of Augustus in 1733, had gone to the company of Johann Ferdinand Müller, a proponent of the old improvisations and harlequinades. Caroline Neuber reacted with a bravura gesture: on stage she enacted the banishment of Harlequin from the theatre. The company never regained its hold, however, and the addition of musical interludes between the acts did not compete with the current popularity of the musical shows. In 1740, on the invitation of the empress Anna, the Neuber company introduced modern theatre to Russia. But the empress died in 1741, and by the time the company returned to Leipzig, Gottsched had allied himself with another company. His differences with Caroline Neuber intensified: she replaced the togas he had specified for his play Der sterbende Cato (“The Dying Cato”) with flesh-coloured tights; he attacked her in his reviews; she represented him in a prologue as a bat-eared censor; an obscene pamphlet written in reply cast aspersions on Neuber’s private life.

In 1747 Neuber quit the stage, but in the following year she returned with a new company, which successfully presented G.E. Lessing’s first play, Der junge Gelehrte (“The Young Scholar”). Indifferent success, however, dogged the company as it played at Dresden, Frankfurt, and Warsaw, as well as Leipzig. In 1753–54 Caroline Neuber attempted to establish herself in Vienna but failed; the outbreak of the third Silesian War (1756), her husband’s death (1759), and the bombardment of Dresden (1760) forced her to leave. She died in a peasant’s hut, and, although she was refused burial in holy ground, a monument was erected in 1776, commemorating her as “the foundress of good taste in the German theatre.” She was later immortalized as Madame Nelly in J.W. von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Emily Rodriguez, Copy Editor.